Advanced Mixology

Like any other job skill, mixology comes with its own challenges you can view from the Job Skills panel. Also, every level brings with it several passive rewards, just like all skills. As Nikita gets better, her drinks become tastier, which draws more tips and gives her customers better buffs. Also, her animations become a bit shorter since she's not dropping bottles, which allows her to serve more customers.

At levels 3, 4, and 5, she gains the ability to make special drinks that the customers may request. Each of the special drinks adds a special buff, which doesn't help her directly, but she can later use those skills if she holds a house party once she and Saint can afford to move out.

Nikita continues to practice making drinks, and between her tips and Saint's promotions, she's getting enough money to give her drinks an extra kick. She heads to the grocery store and buys various fruits, then returns to the bar. She interacts with the bar object and chooses the "Stock Bar" option, then we click-drag the fruits from her inventory. The game stops you from stocking anything that doesn't have a drink associated with it, so unfortunately you can't stock eggs for eggnog.

But what fruits she can stock go into her bar. From there, Nikita interacts with the bar again and selects the "Choose Ingredients For Next Drink..." command. Then, she can choose to have the ingredients chosen for her automatically, or we can manually do so.

Choosing ingredients for drinks (up to two) will increase the quality of said drinks, leading to larger wages and more tips. Drink quality is primarily affected by ingredient quality, not ingredient type. Starting out, the grocery stores sell "Nice" quality fruits, like what Nikita is working with here. It's good enough to make a lot of customers happy, but you can do better with homegrown fruits if you have a garden.

However, there are still upper limits to how much customers are willing to tip based on where you're bartending. Although ingredient type is less important than ingredient quality, that's not to say that ingredient type is irrelevant. Mixing Life Fruit or other rare fruits in your drinks will maximize your tips, but here in the Sports Zone, the customers are only going to be tipping so much. It would be a waste to give up your Life Fruits in a low bar like this.

Be careful when you tell the AI to choose your drinks for you because it will always choose your best, rarest fruits first regardless of what bar you're in! The customers are nice enough to tell you in the push notifiactions if your ingredients are classier than the bar you're in, but that doesn't mean they'll give the ingredients back to you. Given that they consumed them, you probably don't want them back anyway.

Note: If you leave the area without taking your ingredients back, they will remain safe in the bar for the next time you come back. The bars are refrigerated so you won't have to worry about them spoiling while you're away.

Anyway, it's clear that Nikita is on her way up and will soon graduate from the Sports Zone. However, she decides to stay here until she surpasses level 6 because...

Once Nikita hits level 6, unlike the other levels, she doesn't gain the knowledge of a specific new drink. However, she does gain the ability to find and concoct unique drinks based on the bars she works for. This directly feeds into the 5th challenge for the mixology skill, specifically the Professor of Drinks challenge. In this challenge, she needs to learn at least 42 different drinks.

There are, of course, a couple catches. First, every bar has its own drinks, typically named after the bar's theme. Each bar in the game has five or six drinks that can be learned, but you won't know the exact number in each until you learn them. That brings us to the second catch: the act of learning each bar's drinks is completely random after you take a sip of it. Even speaking to one of the normal mixologists with the "Get Mixology Advice" social interaction doesn't help. Besides, she's been working hard and deserves to have some fun! So instead of working for the special drinks' recipes, she's going to be drinking for them!

The next day, Nikita hits up her bar early and starts shotgunning Bad Cheerleaders before noon, which amazingly is not a euphemism. (Hey, it's got to be 11pm somewhere, right?) After only a couple, we see the message shown on the right via a push notification. Nikita has used her developed mixologist taste buds and has figured out the recipe!

Now, even though the game refers to it as a "drink recipe," you do not have to buy any special ingredients. Rather, when Nikita tends a bar (any bar, not just the Sports Zone), she'll be able to create the drink. This is especially important when tending bar in more upscale bars because customers will ask for specific drinks, and if she doesn't know how to make them, things could end badly even if she's an expert mixologist.

Every special drink applies a buff to the Sim who drinks it. While this doesn't affect Nikita's tips, it will be very important in her home life if she starts mixing drinks for company. After all, the Bad Cheerleader buff tends to make Sims a little more flirty and a little more receptive to romantic social interactions, which might be bad news for a married Sim!

Because Nikita wants to spread her wings and start collecting tips from wealthy customers at more upscale bars, Nikita instead goes out on the town orders specialty drinks at each bar until she's got all the knowledge she needs! For quick reference, here's where she went and what she learned...